kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

For over 2 years I have maintained a project for generating VRML models for
use with KiCad.
( See http://kicad3dmodels.sourceforge.net. ) The code includes basic
objects or tools
which can be used to describe parts using parametric models. I think if the
source can be
included in KiCad then more people will use it and perhaps even contribute
to extending
the code. If this sounds like a good idea, let me know and I will start
preparing the code for
inclusion in KiCad. This will take some time since I will have to review
the coding style and
modify the CMake files to integrate well with the KiCad source.

I would propose to add these tools to the 'utils' source directory since it
is an independent tool.
Initial builds would have to be optional since the code has currently only
been tested on Linux;
one of the reasons I would like to move the source into KiCad is to get
more feedback on
cross-platform builds. Hopefully the tools will eventually run on all
supported platforms and can
become a default enabled tool in KiCad. One advantage of this parametric
modeling is that
much less memory is required to produce high quality models when compared
to the current
popular technique of manual modeling in Wings3D + conversion to VRML. The
current tools for
example have a number of Python scripts which can generate many thousands
of models.

- Cirilo